Mary
Soliday’s recent book promises an exploration of the “everyday
genres” students encounter across the curriculum. With the phrase
“everyday genres,” Soliday seems to be invoking those
assignments—including lab reports, research papers, and the
ambiguous “college essay”—that suffuse the American college
curriculum but are divorced from their original disciplinary or
professional exigencies. To a significant degree, Soliday’s central
argument regarding the nature of these everyday genres as a type of
social action will be familiar to readers already conversant with
research in rhetorical genre theory: writers, she argues, benefit
from participation in talk and activities that invite them to enter
into the motives (disciplinary or otherwise) of the assignments,
because these motives give meaning to genre conventions and reader
expectations. While this book may not advance rhetorical genre
studies, it does weave together the reflections, interviews, paper
analyses, and pedagogical innovations documented by a
multi-disciplinary group of graduate student writing fellows in order
to offer insight into another important and poorly understood area:
the complex institutional challenges of delivering a robust general
education program committed to improving access for a diverse student
body.

Soliday’s sites of research
are especially timely as it becomes increasingly clear that the field
of writing studies would benefit from sustained analysis of the
challenges of writing instruction in general education classrooms.
General education courses require disciplinary experts to design
assignments appropriate for the task of introducing non-majors to a
discipline—not as a stepping stone towards further
professionalization or disciplinary learning, but rather to inculcate
the kind of exposure and appreciation that seems central to a liberal
education. Not surprisingly, the resulting conflicts of motives and
genres (for instance, the conflict between the motives of instructors
immersed in disciplinary ways of knowing and those of students
struggling for a decent grade in a required class) pose significant
challenges to
instructors and students in general education courses. The difficulty
of designing assignments appropriate for such courses is often
addressed in WAC workshops and consultations, but explored far less
thoroughly in our scholarly literature. There is, of course, a long
history of naturalistic studies of writing and learning conducted
within disciplinary courses (see Russell, Naturalistic
Studies) and the
past two decades have brought skillful analyses of the institutional
double binds encountered by writers transitioning to workplaces
(e.g., Dias; Freedman) and in FYC (e.g., Russell, Activity
Theory; Wardle).
However, studies that explore the particular institutional context
and internal contradictions of the general education mandate to
introduce non-majors to a discipline have not been as plentiful.
(Adler-Kassner et al., Geisler, and Russell and Yanez provide three
important exceptions.) It is in this context that I read Soliday’s
work with great interest.

Soliday’s
analyses are strongly influenced by two related theoretical
frameworks articulated in the introduction and first chapter: Lave
and Wenger’s model of apprenticeship and rhetorical genre theory.
Together they lead her to emphasize the importance of immersing
students in the social activities of an intellectual community as a
counterbalance to the problems generated by assignment genres
divorced from the recurring rhetorical situations that served as
their initial exigence. Wardle has previously illuminated this
problem as one of “mutt genres”; Soliday (drawing on language
from Prior) describes how genres “in the wild” become
increasingly “domesticated” in ways that lead to internal
contradictions in their “everyday” manifestations for both
instructors and students.

The
heart of the book, presented in Chapters Two and Three, analyzes
assignments given in seven different courses—most of which appear
to be general education courses. In the chapter titled Stance in
Genre, Soliday focuses on how writers learn to address their
readers in ways that are both confident (36) and critical (42). In
Content in Genre, she turns her attention to how
writers figure
out what information is taken for granted and what is considered new
and interesting by their audience. Both processes, Soliday argues,
require “subtle social knowledge” (36) that is “gained through
interaction…with peers and teachers” (83). Throughout these two
chapters, Soliday highlights the problems that arise for writers when
assignments embody conflicting motives—a frequent problem in
general education courses. Take, for instance, her account of the
“college essay” assigned in a psychology course enrolling several
hundred students, taught by a dedicated lecturer and staff of
teaching assistants. Although the prompt “directly solicits” a
“free-floating college essay,” it simultaneously (if indirectly)
invites the type of case study often valued by psychologists.
Comparing the lexis, grammar, and content focus of essays written by
more and less successful students, Soliday concludes that the more
successful writers “adopt[ed] a wilder stance . . . by speaking as
a seasoned therapist” (67), a stance which brings them in line with
the inconsistently articulated motives of the instructor. In many
ways this line of argument echoes Bartholomae’s description of
writers who dare to “carry off the bluff” as they invent the
genres of university writing, with Soliday focusing our attention on
the recurring challenge posed by everyday, domesticated genres
divorced from their initial professional and disciplinary exigencies.

Chapter
Three documents a variety of ways in which students can be invited to
align themselves more successfully with the motives of their
instructors. In one case, instructors and graduate student writing
fellows clarified the genre by clarifying the needs of the audience
reading the methods section of a biology lab report; in another they
demystified instructor expectations through analyzing introductory
paragraphs together in class. In the example of a particularly
effective anthropology course, instructors brought course talk and a
series of activities and assignments into alignment with the motives
of the instructors. Reflecting on the “wildness” of these
assignments, Soliday argues that these instructors “did not offer
domesticated college essays, but instead they contextualized
the [assignments] in numerous ways that gave students access to these
genres as social and rhetorical practices” (98, emphasis mine).
With this idea of contextualization, Soliday brings to the general
education classroom familiar themes from the ongoing scholarly debate
over the value of explicit genre instruction: explicit instruction
can be helpful, she argues, but not without consistent motives and
alignment between the genres of the assignments and the meta-genres
(which she names as classroom talk, note-taking procedures, and so
forth) that surround those assignments. She also spells out the
implications of this perspective on explicit instruction for WAC
practitioners, critiquing the impulse of some instructors to force
writers to figure out expectations on their own rather than designing
a consistent, supportive sequence of activities and assignments.

On
some occasions, the book’s effort to provide accounts of more than
a half dozen disciplinary courses makes it difficult to capture the
nuances of the interplay of genres and meta-genres in any one
classroom (in the ways readers of Prior, Roozen, and others might
expect). This absence is disappointing given how much the book’s
argument focuses on the need to bring them into alignment, and might
have been ameliorated by a clearer explication of how the accounts of
these different classrooms (constructed through a variety of data
collection and analysis methods) can be triangulated to compose more
than a series of anecdotes. Furthermore, the scope of the book leaves
little room to explore the nature of students’ ambivalence and
resistance to aligning themselves with the motives of their
instructors.

However,
the powerful benefit of Soliday’s program-wide focus on assignments
is the way it allows her to insist on institutional responsibility
for promoting the conditions that make students’ engaged
participation possible. Student success is not simply a question,
Soliday reminds us, of designing better assignments or revising
curricula to provide fuller contextualization. In addition to
identifying the pattern of conflicting motives embodied in
assignments across the general education curriculum, Soliday
documents how instructors’ ability to interact with
students—conferencing with them, writing feedback on drafts or
earlier papers, teaching writing in a lecture course with hundreds of
students—depends on the size of their classrooms, the availability
of the pedagogical support provided by the graduate writing fellows,
and other labor conditions. Questions of access and institutional
responsibility dominate the brief final chapter and offer a powerful
challenge not only to WAC practitioners (and the administrators who
provide or withhold their funding), but also to researchers in the
field of writing studies; we should be prompted by this research to
continue exploring the double binds posed by the general education
curriculum for both students and instructors.

I
conclude by highlighting what may already have become apparent in
this review—my fascination with Soliday’s recurrent use of the
trope of “genres in the wild.” Over the past several months, I
have found the metaphors of wildness and domesticity tremendously
generative in conversations with my own students; they have prompted
fruitful considerations of the rhetorical dimensions of genres
traversing different contexts. Still, I found myself wondering as I
read Soliday’s analysis whether the genres are really, in fact,
getting “wilder” in the successful anthropology class. Could it
be that the process of contextualization is instead a viable
substitute for wildness? To extend the metaphor, perhaps the
contextualization Soliday advocates creates a more “cultivated”
habitat rather than a fully “wild” one. Everyday
Genres does not
answer these questions—though future work in rhetorical genre
studies might profitably take up that vocabulary for further
consideration and critique. Nevertheless, by turning our attention
towards the particular intellectual and institutional context of
general education courses, this book stands to make a valuable
contribution to the field of writing studies more generally and, I
predict, to the classroom and administrative practices of individual
readers.